Palimpsest

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At the bottom of each notice, someone had typed, in a tiny font:

Sorry, brother.

Oleg sat back in his squeaky leather chair, his eyes full of frustrated, angry tears.

It is not easy to go without clothing in December. Not in New York. Not through brief, fitful snow blowing down streets like old dreams. The cold was so much keener than he imagined it would be. It tore at him with small cat-teeth, and the blood sped away from his skin, inward, away from the wind. But he was staunch, steadfast. A little tin soldier. Every morning Oleg took off his shirt and walked through the square through which half the world walked. Every night he would sit in a steaming bath until it turned as cold as his shoulders.

By each day's toll of ten in the morning, his chest had already gone clam-white. On his stomach the black mark screamed its dark lines, seething against that frozen flesh. He was ridiculous, terrible in such a throng. He had chosen the most obvious place. Times Square, where the raucous lights were brightest and all the tourists were certain to come, sooner or later. Sooner or later. It was the most dead of all the places the dead loved on this monochrome island, its putrescence beautifully bright against the long gray cadaver, like mushrooms and moths. Everything here had halos. It made him want to die, too, just to stand here, with snow and light on his eyelashes, with the gray daytime sky laughing at all that neon and strobe, all those things whose proper province is the night.

He was preposterous here, obscene. But it was all he could manage. It was all he knew how to do, now, to lay himself at the mercy of his sister, of chance. Whoever the offended administrator was, he was against Oleg, clearly, and cleverer. What could he do but walk through the city, walk among the living who stamped upon the streets of the dead, and let his flesh plead silently for him, to all who watched—administrators, ghosts. An advertisement amid all the advertisements of Times Square, screaming as loudly, flashing as brightly: I'm here, take me, I am willing to go. He was good at this. He knew how to walk straight ahead and allow some wraith he could not now see to come to him. He had never sought a thing out in all his days if it was not a key or a lock. That sort of thing was for other men, other temperaments. Mila had crouched upon his bed, he had called her by no fell rite, sprinkled no blood in a circle, bought nothing at great price.

Yet Oleg walked through the snow, and the wind chapped his skin, and the pain was a wrangling, thorough thing.

“I miss you, Mila. I'm coming as fast as I can,” he whispered, and a woman with her hands stuffed deep in brown pockets flinched away from him: a mad, half-naked thing whispering to himself. Oleg did not look at her. He was proving himself worthy. This was how it was done: you bare your belly to a great beast and endure trials and it all works itself out. There is a treasure or

a sword. Or a woman. And that thing is yours not because you defeated anything, or because your flesh was hard and unyielding, but because you were worthy of it, worthy all along. The trials and the beast were just a way of telling the world you wanted it, and the world asking in her hard way, hard as bones and hollow mountains, if you really and truly did.

And Oleg did. And he watched the people around him, how their gazes flickered to his stained stomach, to the jack-knifing streets there, and back to his eyes, how full of fear they were, how close many of them came to calling the police. But he walked on. He was worthy, a worthy knight, and he would enter the city by low ways. Sooner or later, someone would see him who hid matching cartography under the pad of their foot or beneath their hair, and they would fall together as he and Gabriel had, as he and Lyudmila had, and the world would nod sagely.

Oleg practiced this flagellation for fifteen days.

He had imagined a warm hand pressing against his back a thousand times before it occurred, imagined it so often and so fiercely he hardly felt it when it did happen. Such a small hand, and he was so cold. He looked down at her, a woman with short brown hair whipping around her face like a storm. She was androgynous, unnoticeable, small, her eyes angled upward slightly, a silver fur ruff framing her high cheeks, blistered red by the wind.

“You don't have to do this,” she said, her eyes searching him earnestly, with a kindness like saints kissing. She bent her head before him and smoothed over her hair: on the back of her neck, it was there, black, bright, prickled with gooseflesh.

“I'm here,” she said. “I came.”

Oleg's knees buckled and he dropped to his knees. The tears came faster than he wanted them to, unstopped and messy, chasing breath he could not catch, hitching, heaving gulps of the winter air as he pressed his spinning head into her within a crush of people so great it became a wall and they were alone.

“I watched you,” she said. “I've watched for ten days now, until evening, from that window just there. That's my office. I wanted to know how long you'd do it. I drank about a thousand cups of tea. I ran out of sugar. You just kept coming back and I just couldn't interrupt you, it was so beautiful, so awful. I saw your lips split open. I saw the sore on your temple grow.” She put her hand in his hair. “It was like watching someone be born. You were an angel, a real one, with a terrible name, like in the Bible. No feathers or light, just hardness and falling into the dark. My hands shook on my teacups for ten days. I didn't dare interrupt. But I decided I wanted you, after all. I wanted to stop it for you, to stop the wind and the snow and hold my arms over your head. So I'm here, I came. My name is Hester and I came for you.”

Oleg clawed his way up her height as though she were a craggy hill and his kiss was like biting into her warmth. Under his teeth the blood of her lip welled up, a hot red thing between their mouths.

“I'm here,” he choked, “take me, I'm willing to go. Any where. Away. Please.”

And Hester took him like a beggar onto the train, which he would not remember, far to the north end of the island, and into an apartment he barely saw through the film of his cold and his grief and his need. He was so hungry for her he thought for a moment his body would simply leap out of itself and into her, a second body, compressed and crimson and screaming within the freezing shell of his elbows and knees. He kissed her neck where it was black as frostbite, bit it, shut his eyes against her and grabbed at her hips, just to pull her closer than anatomy allows, just to swallow her warmth, her sweet breath like milky tea.

“Wait,” she gasped, her shirt already wrinkled up over her belly, her jeans unbuttoned. “It's been so long… just wait.” She put her palm against her cheek, her eyes wild, glistening. “It's been so long since I did this.”

“What? I thought you'd be… I don't know. Old hat. A veteran.”

“I didn't want it,” Hester snapped, slumping onto her threadbare brown couch. “I don't. I said no—remember that word? I turned away from it. All of it.” She pulled out a drawer on a small blue table; it was filled with dusky orange bottles the color of dead suns, bottles not unlike his own at home. “I have six prescriptions to make sure I sleep black and deep. Dreamless. Get it? I didn't want it. I didn't want to see that place, ever again. I grew my hair just long enough to cover the mark and I ate pills till the city went away. It's been years. I stopped. It is possible to stop. Until a ghastly, frozen angel comes walking down the street and you think: No more. He's not my responsibility. Someone else take this one, someone else come with a long coat and wrap him up, someone else kiss him until he's warm again! Why won't they come? Why won't they come? But they don't come. No one else is coming, and he's freezing and so beautiful you think the wind might take him just to ease its loneliness. And you're lonely, too. And you tell yourself he's worthy, if anyone ever was.”

Hester was up on her knees on the couch cushions, bent over the torn arm of the sofa, her nails digging into the upholstery, staring at the floor, her voice thick and ragged. Oleg stroked her arm timidly, not knowing how to help her, until she grabbed his hand and dug her nails into it instead. She tilted her face to be kissed again, such a terribly deliberate act, slow and resigned, that he simply slumped into her, awkwardly, falling together in a heap onto the couch, their tongues hard and hostile. Her breasts were small and cold beneath her shirt; she did not stop him when he pushed her jeans down, or when he turned her around so that she held the edges of the unraveled upholstery to keep herself kneeling as he moved her knees apart and pushed into her, still frozen and shaking. It was not easy—she was dry and unyielding, her teeth clenched, her breath sucking thin and sharp at the air. That she did not stop him was all she seemed to be able to contribute, and the pills rattled in her drawer as he buried his face into her neck. His body leapt out of itself; she held his arm around her waist. “I don't want to go back,” she whispered helplessly.